- Dynamo Moscow CEO Anatoly Kharchuk says he told Alex Ovechkin the club will be waiting for him
- Kharchuk says Dynamo would build its roster around Ovechkin if he comes back to the KHL
- Read below for what Ovechkin said when Kharchuk brought it up in person
Alex Ovechkin’s hometown club is already making plans for a day nobody has put on a calendar.
Dynamo Moscow CEO Anatoly Kharchuk told Pavel Lysenkov of Match TV that he met with the Washington Capitals captain this summer and told him Dynamo will be there whenever his NHL career ends. Kharchuk went a step further and said the KHL club would build its roster around him.
Lysenkov pointed out that Dynamo would have to reshape itself to fit a player of that size. The Dynamo boss did not flinch at the idea.
“Mega-people like Sasha Ovechkin exist in all kinds of fields,” Kharchuk said, as translated from Russian. “And teams are always built around people like that, in science, in life, anywhere, hockey included. If Sasha comes back, I think the work will go toward building a team around a man like him. Because Sasha is a colossal personality.”
The two go back a long way. Kharchuk was Dynamo’s president during the 2004-05 Superleague championship season, with a teenage Ovechkin on the roster months before he left for Washington.
He came back to the club in July for what is now his fourth stint there, and he raised the retirement question the next time he and Ovechkin sat down.
“It was 2004, your championship season in the Superleague, we worked together back then,” Kharchuk recalled telling him. “Strangely enough, I have just returned, and you have already said several times that you might finish your career at Dynamo. This time, Sasha, I will wait for you 100 percent. And I will do everything so that we finish this magnificent story together.”
Asked what Ovechkin said back, Kharchuk kept it short.
“We smiled at each other, and that was it.”
None of this is coming out of nowhere. Ovechkin has said he wants his final professional game to be in a Dynamo sweater, he has talked about moving his family back to Moscow once he is done in the NHL, and his mother Tatyana has said she hopes he ends up back in the blue and white.
Kharchuk described a player who never really left. Ovechkin has been a senior advisor to Dynamo since 2010, he has recommended kids to the club’s academy after spotting them at practice, and he spent this month back in Moscow taking a ceremonial kick before a Dynamo football match. Take a look:
The 40-year-old also left an impression on Kharchuk long before any of the records. He remembers Ovechkin’s mother asking the coaches to let her son skate with the grown men, and the kid carving figure eights behind the net.
“This is a talent that is born once every 50 years,” Kharchuk said. “It was impossible not to notice him.”
Washington still holds him for one more year. Ovechkin re-signed on July 2 at a $4.25 million cap hit, and he opens his 22nd NHL season sitting on 929 regular-season goals:
Ovechkin has not said the 2026-27 season will be his last in North America. Kharchuk is not waiting on that answer to start planning.
